handle preserving gcov

["Robert Henry" <rrh at google dot com>]

I'm pondering some extension to gcov and its compile-time and run-time support.

I want to be able to run an unchanging instrumented victim binary
multiple times.  Each time I run the victim binary I have a
unique invocation handle.  The handle can be an integer; some client
of gcov and the driver can map integers to names.

I'd like to add a 2nd column to the gcov statement profile output that
shows some invocation handle, where the handle is chosen from the
first (or last, or most frequent) victim invocation to execute the
statement.

This way I can look at the statement profile output and determine
which invocation I should rerun in order to get some desired behaviour
out of the victim program.

Case in point: the victim is gcc.  The invocation handle is a hash of
the test program's name from some test suite.  The question at hand is
"which test program causes gcc to execute this statement inside of
gcc?".

Has anybody in the gcov developer community pondered  or done such a thing?

Robert Henry
Google